Lav's Music Corner

Rosalia is a Spanish singer, songwriter, and musical auteur. Her major critical breakthrough came on her conceptual 2018 album El Mal Querer. A few years later, she transcended her experimental darling status into a full-blown superstar on the massively acclaimed and massively popular Motomami . Now, 3 years later, she remains one of the biggest stars of Spanish music, making LUX  one of the most anticipated new albums of the year. Now that it's here, the album resoundingly lives up to every expectation leveled upon it.  LUX  only had one single, but god is it a swing for the fences fitting for an album so bold. "Berghain" sees Rosalia teaming up with Yves Tumor and Bjork, but more than any of those brilliant artists, it's the blasting baroque instrumentation that absolutely steals the show. The album follows this trend with several of its shorter songs aiming high and hitting their mark. That starts early with the excellent table setter "Sexo, Violencia y Llanta...

Anna Von Hausswolff is a singer/songwriter who has always made waves for their distinctly intense and occasionally brooding style of music that makes prominent use of the pipe organ. Her peak of critical acclaim came on 2018's brooding yet expansive Dead Magic . Her 2020 follow-up was an entirely instrumental record, meaning ICONOCLASTS  had the chance to be a long-awaited return to form. Instead, the record presents a sound both brighter and more intimate than ever before, but finds a similar level of fascination in doing so.  The singles predicted this shift in style, but they were all so good that I never had the chance to even be suspicious about it. "Facing Atlas" is the first of the singles to pop up on the record, and it's a great way to begin the experiment. The song sounds more like something you'd hear on a Susanne Sundfor record than what I expect from Anna. The beauty of its angelic chimes matches really well with a chapel-sized performance from Anna. ...

These are reviews of 5 records that I was pretty sure weren't going to top my albums of the year list, but I nonetheless wanted to talk about because of the significance of the artists behind them.  AM I THE DRAMA?  - Cardi B Cardi B's story is something I've always been very interested in. After years of teasing the release of a sophomore record, I really thought she might have waited too long to capitalize on any of the meteoric hype she generated from 2017 to 2020. Now that the record is out and being digested by fans, the verdict is very much still out. One person who thinks about Cardi's place in popular culture even more than I do is Cardi herself. Her debatably triumphant return is the subject of the first two tracks on the record, the pretty good "Dead" and the mediocre "Hello." While Cardi does a lot of flexing on the record, the results are pretty inconsistent, and the best victory lap she takes on the song "Check Please" outclass...